What to Stream This Weekend

It can be a razor-thin line sometimes between the ponderously pretentious and the delicately insightful. Thin enough that artists and audiences alike can trip over it. Indie director David Lowery has made his relatively brief career making movies that are, if not overly slow and contemplative, at least slower and more contemplative than you were expecting.

Lowery broke through at Sundance in 2013 with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a beautifully photographed spoonful of molasses about a young couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) who end up on the wrong side of a shootout and end up having to pay for it for the rest of their lives. It won Lowery a lot of attention, and he was justifiably pegged as an expert craftsman. As a storyteller, the results were a little more mixed, but he was definitely a director to watch. Following up a movie like Ain’t Them Bodies Saints with a remake of the Disney property Pete’s Dragon was certainly a curious choice, and it didn’t exactly result in a massive blockbuster smash, but don’t let that fool you into thinking you should skip it. Lowery made a movie that is sensitive, packed with well-earned sentiment, and one of the best examples of well-done Disney in quite a while, where the big CGI dragon is almost incidental.

A Ghost Story, which also played Sundance this year, after having been acquired by A24. It represents Lowery melding the pristine visuals (and principal cast) of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints with the better storytelling instincts of a Pete’s Dragon (though that’s about where the similarities to Pete’s Dragon end), and then goes far above and beyond what either of those two movies were able to produce.

The premise is disarmingly simple. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play a young couple who are happy-ish, living in a home that he likes and she doesn’t, so much. They argue, though not particularly vehemently. Mostly they sit quietly and look like they’re coming to some decisions. There is a LOT of sitting quietly, and that’s just when both of the participants in the scene are living characters who can see one another. Because, and I can’t imagine this would be a spoiler for a movie called A Ghost Story, Affleck’s character is involved in a car accident and dies. And instead of passing on into … whatever … he stays around. Outside of his body, invisible to the living, but around. He even dons a long white sheet in order to better embody the idea of a ghost. And then he returns home and starts haunting.

A Ghost Story could so easily have become unbearable. For one thing, it moves SO slowly. You’ve likely heard the story about how Rooney Mara’s character, now living alone and unable to see or hear her partner as he ghosts around their house, spending an entire scene eating a pie. She sure does. The passage of time is incredibly slow, which makes sense for a being who for all he knows might end up existing forever. It’s also a movie of very few words, which means that the words that do end up getting spoken throughout the course of the movie feel like Lowery telling you something he wants you to find very important. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie that feels like it was pulled out of Richard Linklater’s animated existential meditation Waking Life, a movie that serves as a pretty good barometer for whether you’ll have the patience for A Ghost Story.

I hope you do, because the reward for sticking with A Ghost Story and following it on its own terms is that the story and its themes begin to pull together. Affleck’s character doesn’t receive a purpose or anything. He never has to solve a murder or figure out a mystery. But the nature of his newfound immortality begins to feel purposeful, and scenes that were once just ponderous now feel significant. It’s a heck of a trick on Lowery’s part.

This isn’t really an actor’s movie. Affleck is literally under a sheet for the bulk of the proceedings, and Mara, while doing great work, is pretty still throughout. The star of this show is David Lowery, whose shot compositions and storytelling creativity are on full display. He’s a major talent, and by the time you’ve walked the entire tightrope of A Ghost Story, I hope you’ll think so too.